| — | Maya Angelou |
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We have come by curious ways
To the Light that holds the days;
We have sought in haunts of fear
For that all-enfolding sphere:
And lo! it was not far, but near.We have found, O foolish-fond,
The shore that has no shore beyond.Deep in every heart it lies
With its untranscended skies;
For what heaven should bend above
Hearts that own the heaven of love?~ Alfred Noyes ~
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Sun-swept beaches with a light wind blowing
From the immense blue circle of the sea,
And the soft thunder where long waves whiten —
These were the same for Sappho as for me.Two thousand years — much has gone by forever,
Change takes the gods and ships and speech of men —
But here on the beaches that time passes over
The heart aches now as then.~ Sara Teasdale ~
Beautiful.
| — | Wilfred Owen (died 4 November 1918) |
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.
From my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii &c &c — my mind had been habituated to the Vast — & I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions not by my sight — even at that age. Should children be permitted to read Romances, & Relations of Giants & Magicians, & Genii? — I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. — I know no other way of giving the mind a love of “the Great,” & “the Whole.” — Those who have been led by the same truths step by step thro’ the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess — They contemplate nothing but parts — and are parts are necessarily little — and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things. It is true, the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former method; — but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favor? I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness; but when they looked at great things, all became a blank, and they saw nothing, and denied that any thing could be seen, and uniformly put the negative of a power for the possession of a power, and called the want of imagination judgment, and the never being moved to rapture philosophy.
- Letter to Thomas Poole (16 October 1797)
Awake, my soul! not only passive praise
Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears,
Mute thanks and secret ecstasy. Awake,
Voice of sweet song! awake, my heart, awake!
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.
- “Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni” (1802)
Solemnly seemest like a vapoury cloud
To rise before me — Rise, oh, ever rise;
Rise like a cloud of incense from the earth!
Thou kingly spirit throned among the hills,
Thou dread ambassador from earth to heaven,
Great hierarch! tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.
- “Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni” (1802) final lines
Posted via email from Joshua Oakley - Dreams Poetry Visions Imagination Beauty | Comment »

“We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.”
“It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”
“We depend on our words … Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character … We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word “reality” is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.”
“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”
“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.”
- Niels Bohr (Born October 7, 1885)
*****
Posted via email from Joshua Oakley - Dreams Poetry Visions Imagination Beauty | Comment »

